Welcome to Cliché Stadium for the last Major League Baseball game of this year. It takes place tonight. When it is over, there will be no tomorrow.
Not one necessarily worth contemplating anyway.
Except for Giants partisans who would have preferred the opportunity to bubble-wrap the Commissioner’s Trophy, fasten its seatbelt and fly it home, nobody didn’t want a Game Seven, what with it containing all those marbles to say nothing of that whole ball of wax. Save your nuance for when there is a tomorrow. Tonight, the result will be stark: a winner, a loser, a conclusion.
Great that it ends this way. Too bad it must end, but as long as it does, make it definitive.
Game Six arrived with its own cultish credentials, though the fact that most of them are recited on demand whenever we have a Game Six dampens my expectation that anything Bucknerish will explode in our midst. Sometimes the legend is lived up to, but you can’t special-order the David Freese to go [1], y’know? Tuesday night’s Game Six blowout served its purpose [2] of keeping the Royals going so there could be a Game Seven. My favorite part of the non-drama came while I listened to the early innings on the radio and heard K.C. fans robustly cheer everything remotely positive. That, I thought, is the way to be. My favorite part of the last Game Six the Mets played [3], besides the Mets winning it, was rising among 56,334 at Shea and not giving up on the 2006 NLCS. We made unceasing noise with little provocation from the start and raised the volume exponentially when Jose Reyes homered on the third pitch of the bottom of the first.
It worked. We got our Game Seven (which worked less well, but never mind that right now). We and the Mets kept going, which is all you can ask when you’re down three-two. It was all the Royals could ask for and they got it. As someone who’s been pulling for the Giants [4], I wasn’t too happy with the seven runs Big Game Jake Peavy and the previously impenetrable Yusmeiro Petit allowed in the second, but as the night dragged on in AfterGl@v!ne fashion — minus the angst, of course — I couldn’t come out against the end result being Game Seven.
I mean, c’mon, Game Seven! When we’re officially unaligned, Game Seven is our team. That’s our rooting interest. We’re all stakeholders in the National Pastime at a moment like this. We beseech the gods to give us first a Game Seven, then a good Game Seven, maybe, if we are so bold, a great Game Seven. The first six games have had their moments but never quite enough of them strung together to evangelize over. The 2014 World Series has been one of those shows you reflexively tell your apathetic friends who haven’t been watching, “ya gotta see this!” but when they tune in, it’s inevitably while one side is steamrolling the other side and you swear, no, really, it’s better than this usually.
A seven-game World Series is supposed to be the best World Series. I think back to 2005, though, which went the minimum four games. But they were four fantastic games [5]. The only thing that was objectively wrong with them as a set was the White Sox won all of them and the Astros lost all of them. It, like its Nielsens, sank into oblivion, which is too bad. Aesthetically, you couldn’t get a fabber four. But few pay mind to a quartet come late October. Six games is the commonly accepted currency for what constitutes a good Series, seven games the universally agreed amount you must exchange to obtain greatness.
The quality of this World Series has thus far ebbed more than it’s flowed, but the quantity is perfect. Game Seven tonight. If the actual game matches the circumstances’ reputation, it will leave us a little something to enjoy remembering tomorrow.
(Spoiler alert: there will be a tomorrow.)